flavor, a combination of yeast bread and deep-frying. Its batter is the consistency of thick pancake

mix. It is a no-knead batter, so it only takes minutes to combine the dough. After rising, the cook

stretches doughnut-size pieces by hand before it is slipped into hot oil.

The Whys and Hows of Bread Dough

Many practical cooks create with their hands and verify the result with their taste buds. They

modify their creations according to what their taste buds tell them. They have little interest in what

happens during the process of preparing and cooking that dish as long as it tastes right.

But it is useful to know that all our cooking and baking is no more than a series of physical

and chemical changes within the basic ingredients induced by your actions. For instance, when you

stir, apply heat on the stove-top or in the oven, or add a substance like vinegar, you induce changes

in the chemical or physical makeup.

Of the large number of cooking and baking techniques you undertake in your kitchens, there

are a few where your understanding what is happening is helpful if you want the best. Bread baking

is one of them. Understanding the basics behind the process can be an enormous help in producing a

good bread. And in the unlikely case of a failure, you can pin down the problem if you understand

the process. Many accomplished cooks refuse baking breads thanks to some failed loaves in the

distant past, an obvious embarrassment to their cooking ego. Yet it is an even more embarrassment

not to be able to put a fabulous fresh yeast loaf on the table.

There are a number of good bread-baking books on the market. Most give no more than

recipes and describe bread-making techniques. Some are accurate, others must have copied the

information from another source without the bother to understand it. To illustrate, the author of an

otherwise excellent book on bread baking used the words yeast and bacteria interchangeably. The

two organisms are not even second cousins. The only common thing between them is that they are

both microscopic in size.

So let's talk about the whys and hows of breads. Breads are either unleavened or leavened.

Without yeast (commercially produced or wild from the air), breads are unleavened that bake into

the Mexican tortilla, the Indian chapatis or the Jewish matzo, to mention a few. None of these are

particularly tasty enough to eat by themselves. The texture, structure and flavor yeast imparts to the

baked dough is absent from these unleavened breads, leaving them figuratively and literally flat.

Try to bake a bread dough without yeast in a loaf pan. You end up with a heavy crust on the

outside and partially baked or unbaked dough inside—an inedible, heavy lump, good only for

throwing or as a door stop. The dough must be leavened before it becomes edible bread.

Leavened bread are in two major categories, based on what makes it expand: quick

breads and yeast breads.

Quick Breads

Quick breads are made from batter in which the leavener, that mysterious ingredient that

creates bubbles for airy lightness, is either baking powder, baking soda, or a combination of both.

We bake quick breads in bread pans, as we do the familiar zucchini bread, but muffins, scones and

biscuits are also brothers and sisters to quick breads. For true quick breads the batter is thin enough

that you can just barely pour, for biscuits it is thick enough that you can roll out—it is all the matter

of liquid to flour ratio.

Chemical leavening—baking powder—was developed in England around 1835 as an

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